Introduction to Digital Humanities - Undergraduate Course

Welcome! You are about to explore materials created for a 15-week, no-coding, undergraduate digital humanities (DH) course at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. This site was designed to provide instructors with all the content needed to teach an introduction to the dynamic and interdisciplinary field of DH that focuses on developing skills in digital research and project planning. By putting materials on-line and making every effort to use free and/or on-line resources in the course, we hope to encourage use by instructors new to the field or those at liberal arts colleges. If you do not need a fully developed DH class, you may find it more productive to use this site as a repository of DH materials from which you can download whole modules or units or select materials.

These materials can also be found in a Google Drive folder.

This project was made possible with funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities CARES Act Grant.

Introduction to Digital Humanities

This is a 2-week lesson that takes students through a high level overview of how digital humanities developed. Week 1 introduces students to the early years of digital humanities and how it fits into the Humanities, and week 2 walks them through the growth of the DH field.

Units: What are the Humanities and Digital Humanities? | History of Digital Humanities

Digital Project Design

This is a 5-week lesson that introduces students to the steps of doing a digital project. Week 1 focuses students on the stages of a project: collection, analysis, and publication. The next 3 weeks exposes students to resources and tools for finding and publishing their digital research (more in depth discussion of analysis is saved for the next lesson - Select Digital Methods), as well as getting students to think about the ethical ramifications of the information they use in their digital projects. The final week in the lesson is deticated to getting students to practice building a project using Omeka.

Units: Stages of Digital Project | Finding Data and Data Ethics | Project Design Process | Building a Project with Omeka

Select Digital Methods

This is a 6-week lesson that gives students an introductory walkthrough of a few common methods used in digital humanities. Week 1 focuses on digital storytelling to introduce a core purpose of digital humanities projects, and provides tools and examples for how they might present their final projects. Week 1 also acts as a very light introduction to the methods that will be discussed in following weeks. Week 2 introduces how visualization is used and thought about in digital humanities, and how it provides a critical framework for thinking about the methods the class will explore in the following weeks. Week 3 has students look at how maps are used in digital humanities projects and introduces some basic GIS concepts and practices. In weeks 4 and 5, the students learn about cultural analytics, basic text analysis, and topic modeling. Week 6 exposes students to network analysis and introduces them to various tools for analyzing the interdepence of their information under investigation.

Units: Digital Storytelling | Visualization | Mapping & GIS | Distant Reading | Networks

Developing Digital Projects

This is a 2-week section in which students will work on their final DH projects. In this area you will find all the materials (upper and lower-level) that are used to guide students through their projects. These materials include: project prompts, project proposal documents, project reflective essay prompts, project peer review documents, and project grading rubrics.

Materials: Project Guides, Prompts, & Reviews

Resources

This section contains quicklinks to the assignments, exercises, readings (sorted by week), syllabi, and tutorials (sorted by digital method).

Contents: Activities | Assignments | Additional Topics | Readings | Syllabi | Tutorials

Course Contributors

John Ansley, Ph.D. (Project Director), Desiree Dighton, Ph.D. (@ddighton), Clare Flemming, M.S., M.A., Brian Norberg, M.L.S., M.A (@bnorberg)

Contact

Contact John Ansley (john.ansley@marist.edu)